


we used to

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s10e02 Founder's Mutation, Episode: s10e03 Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster, F/M, Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 19:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10815156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: Two FBI agents journey back to each other.(Series of ficlets.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the prompt "Do I make you happy?"
> 
> Original post: https://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/151681341198/hey-i-wanted-to-know-if-you-were-still-doing

****He wakes up on the floor of Sanjay’s apartment. Scully’s absorbed in her doctor routine, her fingers nudging at his hairline. She hasn’t done that since he got the flu three years ago. “Mulder,” she says. “Are you okay? How’s your head?”

He grimaces at the ache in his forehead. “I’m okay.”

“What was wrong?” Scully’s looking at him with wide eyes. He wonders if she’s thinking about the headaches she used to get when she had cancer.

“Ringing,” Mulder says, using the table to get to his feet. “In my head.”

Her fingers skate over his forehead. “Have you experienced it before? Recently?” He shakes his head. “Mulder, I think you should be checked out by someone.”

“I’m fine, doc, really,” he insists. They brush past the officers in the living room. One shoots him an irritated look. “How much trouble we in?”

“I need to call Skinner.” Scully takes his hand as they exit the apartment. It’s startling to feel their fingers sliding together; he’d forgotten how cold her fingers are. “Mulder, I don’t think you should be alone,” she says quietly. “We don’t know the effects of what happened to you.”

* * *

She sets a folded up shirt and pair of sweatpants on the edge of the couch. “Here, these are, uh, yours.”

He feels uncomfortable in her living room, out of place in this unfamiliar apartment. “I’m fine to drive, Scully, really. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.” The ache left by the throbbing has dulled with the ibuprofen she’d passed him in the car, before driving him to her apartment instead of calling an Uber.

Scully refolds the t-shirt - an Oxford one - a nervous habit, he can tell. “You should be monitored, Mulder. There’s no telling what the results of that headache could be.”

“There’s no evidence that there’s anything more than a headache.”

“And there’s no evidence that it’s not somehow connected with the case. Or something… worse.”

He doesn’t actually have a good response for that.

“Stay,” Scully says firmly. “Bathroom’s, uh, down the hall if you want to take a shower.”

He’s helpless to argue. She still buys the same soap, same shampoo. The shirt she gave him smells like her. She’s been wearing it. 

He wants to say, _goddamnit, Scully, this isn’t the old days, and you can’t just tuck me in and forget about it. We’ve been through too much to act like this doesn’t mean anything. Like we can both move on._ He is standing in her new apartment, in clothes that were his but are hers, and he hates the paint color of her bathroom. They’d painted some of the rooms of their house together, on a scorching hot day where he’d managed to get paint all over himself, and her when he’d tried to pull her in for a kiss and she’d tripped, falling against him and smearing blue all up her front. She’d laughed, which was a rarer sound than usual those days. He’d liked those paint colors. This paint color reminds him of the day they’d fought, and she’d locked herself in the bedroom with her laptop and he’d stubbornly painted his study by himself and she’d complained about the color and the paint job viciously. He wonders if she picked a color that neither of them liked so that her stomach would twist every time she went into the bathroom. 

Or maybe she’d wanted to distance herself from him. From their old life. But, no, that can’t be it, because she came back. To the office, at least, and he never thought she’d go back there, if given the option. 

There is a blanket on the couch, and he expected this, honestly, for her to not want to talk. But then Scully comes out of a door that must lead to her bedroom - not their bedroom, but hers, it hasn’t been _her_ bedroom since 2002 - in an oversized t-shirt that he also remembers as being his. “Are you still feeling okay?” she asks. “No pain?”

“No pain.” He sits awkwardly on her couch, pushing the blanket aside. He thinks about a night a long time ago where they would’ve fallen asleep in front of the TV on this couch, or stayed up late reading, or just lay under blankets talking. He loves the sound of her voice, even though he’s only heard it rarely for the past couple of years. It used to be the only one he heard. Before he retreated into his office, his own head, and didn’t look back. He wishes he had.

She leans forward and kisses his forehead gently before turning to go back into the bedroom.

He wants to scream, _what are you doing, tell me what you want, come home_. He settles for, “Do I make you happy?” 

Scully turns, hair curling around her shoulders, sleepy eyes staring at him. 

“Or… did I. Did I make you happy.” He stares at his hands. 

“You did,” she says quietly. “And I think you could again. But when you didn’t… that was when I had to leave.” 

Either of them could take a step towards each other, close the distance between them and try to heal their wounds. But it is too early. There is too much left unsaid, that can’t be left unsaid. And tonight is not the right night to say it. He’d forgotten how tiring this job was. 

“Night, Scully.” 

She smiles like she did before she left him in the parking garage three days ago. Like a promise of more to come. “Night, Mulder.” 

She checks on him three times during the night, her hand on his forehead as she checks his pupils and asks him if it hurts and random questions to test his memory. He thinks about going into her bedroom, sliding in between the cool sheets and wrapping his arms around her. But the bedroom would be as strange as the apartment, where the walls don’t know him and he doesn’t know Scully here, not yet. The time will come, he knows, but not yet. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based off the prompt "That's why I love you".
> 
> Original post: https://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/150935021483/thats-why-i-love-you-scully-to-mulder

The nearest hotel is almost an hour out of town. When the manager tries to protest about checkout times, Mulder flashes his badge and he shuts up immediately. “Will you drive?” he asks Scully when they get to the car.

She blinks. “Mulder, are you sick?”

He shrugs. “You’ve driven before. Were you expecting a little feet joke?”

“Partially, yes,” she says wryly, climbing into the driver’s seat and adjusting it. Mulder climbs into the passenger seat and pulls out his phone, typing _werelizard_ into the Google search bar. She rolls her eyes. 

By the time they get to the new hotel, Mulder has scrolled through a variety of blogs and some more-than-suspicious looking pictures. Scully rolls her eyes and leaves him in the car while she goes to check in. She taps on his window when she returns. “There’s only one room. I went ahead and rented it.” 

He looks up from the glow of the screen in surprise. “Scully, are you sure?”

She feels like rolling her eyes, and wonders if wearing his shirt wasn’t obvious enough. Then again, it wasn’t a shirt he’d worn very much. She’d pulled it from the dirty clothes pile and tucked it into her suitcase the night she left in the mindset that it would still smell like him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mulder. Come on, it’s late.” 

There’s two beds in the suite, one of which she has no intention of using. She changes into his old Knicks shirt in the bathroom, and sits beside him on one of the beds when she comes out. Mulder’s still absorbed in his phone, tapping manically. “Look, Scully, this blog of paranormal sightings claimed they saw a human turn into a lizard once,” he says, flashing the screen at her.

She smiles. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, Mulder.” 

“There’s a picture, see?” He enlarges a photo of a teenage boy who’s legs are partially covered in green scales. 

“Haven’t you heard of Photoshop, Mulder?”

“This looks authentic,” he insists, jabbing at the screen with one finger. 

If she closes her eyes, she could almost pretend they’re back in the basement, arguing over dusty old files with the rest of their life ahead of them. “An entry on an obscure paranormal sighting blog is hardly plausible documentation.”

“There’s multiple other documentation, I might add. I have files on this type of case, Scully, files going back to the sixties,” Mulder says smugly.

“Were the witnesses on those cases as unreliable as the ones on this case?” she shoots back. “None of the people who have seen the monster were sober at the time!”

“Technically, I only saw the hotel manager drinking _after_ he saw the monster. And what about the animal control officer? He was with me when we were attacked.”

“He didn’t bother to give a statement.”

Mulder crosses his arms. “And what about me? I saw it.”

She remembers the sheer terror at seeing him prone on the ground with blood on his face, how the fear had fallen away when he’d grinned and shown her his phone. For a minute, she’d thought she’d lost him before she had a chance to get him back. “Yeah, you did.”

“It’s a monster,” he repeats, petulant, stubborn.

Scully smiles in spite of herself. She’s missed him, more than she even realized. “That’s why I love you.”

He’s taken aback by the comment, ducking his head to hide his face. “You do?”

She swallows painfully. “Do you think I left because I didn’t?”

His mood has clearly dropped; he turns off the phone screen and pushes it to the side. “I kind of assumed so, yes.”

Scully shakes her head fiercely. “Mulder, no.” She touches his shoulder, but he won’t look at her. “I left because it was the only thing I could see to do,” she says softly. “But I never stopped loving you.” She’d missed him like air every night without him, the bed cold and empty, an unfamiliar apartment where the only ties to her old life were some old shirts, the wedding ring she keeps on her necklace, and a torn picture of their son. 

“Me, either,” he mumbles. 

She reaches forward, cups his cheek and kisses him. “I’ve missed you,” she says into his hair. 

He pulls her closer by two fistfuls of her shirt. “You, too,” he murmurs. They stay like that, wrapped around each other, for a long minute. 

“Scully,” he says finally. “You’re wearing my shirt.”

She smiles against his forehead. “Glad you finally noticed.” 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based off the prompt "Let's just stay here a little longer".
> 
> Original post: https://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/152172502383/30

The sheets in her apartment are too stiff, not worn down from years of sleep. Too new. He hasn’t had new sheets in ten years. But still, there she is, on the other side of them, and that’s enough to make him forget about these unfamiliar sheets, this unfamiliar room. 

Before she left, before he’d started falling asleep at his desk out of habit, he used to always get up earlier out of pure habit and make coffee and breakfast before she had to go into work. Judging by the clattering of claws on the other side of the door, he should probably take Daggoo out, too. Mulder crawls across the bed to kiss her forehead, and stops when he feels her stirring beneath him.

“C’mere,” she mutters sleepily, pulling him down so that his head is on her shoulder, nose mashed somewhat awkwardly in her sleep-mussed hair. He laughs and kisses her earlobe.

“Let’s just lay here a little longer,” she mutters, winding an arm around his neck. 

It’s been years since they’ve just lain in bed like this. Almost a week since the case in Oregon, their first night together since then. Part of him wonders why they didn’t go home, to _their_ room, _their_ bed. Wonders why she brought him back to a place that can only be hers. He has no idea what her plans are, no idea what her intentions are for the future. It’s almost like they’ve hopped into a time machine to 2000, before their son, before living together for so long that they knew each other’s habits, were practically finishing each other’s sentences. 

“What are we doing?” he says into her neck.

“Sleeping,” Scully mutters. 

“No.” He hates to do this, but it needs to be said. He rises up on his elbow to meet her eyes. “With our… partnership. Relationship, whatever. What are we doing? Are you going to move back home?”

Her eyes fly open, and she stares up at him. “Mulder…” 

“And don’t give me any shit about Bureau policy, because we both know that doesn’t mean anything,” he says. 

“I’m coming home,” she insists. “…when it’s right.”

Mulder sighs, leaning back into his pillow. Her pillow. “When will it be right, Scully? It’s been two years. We both have things to work through, I know, but…”

He’d been constantly scared for her after she left. He’d driven to the store and bought a flip phone three day after she left, despite the fact that she’d bought him a new phone, a nice phone, the day she left. (She’d slid it across the table and said, _To keep in touch, I already put my new number in_ , and somehow, that had hurt worse than almost everything else. That she’d prepared so well.) He’d bought it for the exclusive reason of his worry for her (that they’d found her, that she was dead, that she really was never coming home [because what if she changed her mind someday, she wouldn’t really leave him forever, would she], or even if she never was, that she wasn’t living happily somewhere else, leaving behind all the pain he’d caused her), and he didn’t know if she’d answer if she saw his name pop up on the screen. He’d call and listen to her brisk, “Dr. Scully” before hanging up. He could always breathe a little easier after that. The fourth time he did it, she’d said, “I know it’s you, Mulder.” He’d just listened to her breathe for a moment before she added, “It’s okay. I wanted to know if you were okay, too.” It’d gone from a nightly ritual to a weekly ritual - one of them would call the other and just listen to the breathing for a few minutes. Just to check. They’d both never gotten over that constant worry. But they’d never talked, not until Tad O’Malley had come.

Now, being back on the X Files, his worry has increased, silly as it is. It seems ridiculous to be jumpy at the thought of two telepathic teenagers who were just getting revenge on their father - but still. They slammed Scully into a wall. What if they were to find her apartment one night while she’s sleeping, and- He really doesn’t mind sleeping in her apartment when he thinks of it that way.

But he misses her in their house. He wants her home. He’d even let her bring the dog, it spent a day with a cryptid, how bad can it be. 

She sighs. “I can’t right now, Mulder.” 

He blinks. “Okay,” he says. He slips out of bed and goes to let Daggoo out. She says his name, and he doesn’t turn around. He gets the leash and his coat from the rack by the door, and walks Daggoo up and down the block. He stares up at the apartment building and wonders if he should go back up.

Daggoo yips plaintively, and scrabbles his paws against the leg of his pants. Mulder gives the dog a serious look, and rides the elevator back up to her apartment. 

Scully’s already showered and is in her kitchen. “I thought you’d left, but I didn’t think you steal my dog just to get back at me,” she says, handing him a cup of coffee. 

Their fingers brush as he takes the mug, a Bigfoot one that he’d bought for her years ago in a Washington gift shop. “Scully…” he starts.

“I love you,” she says firmly. “I do. I want this to work, it’s why I came back.”

“But,” he says. 

“I can’t come home yet.” She swallows hard. “Mulder, there’s a thousand good memories in that house, but there’s a thousand bad memories, too. Before I let, all I could see there were ghosts. The ghosts of ourselves. The ghost of our son, what could have been.”

“You don’t see that in the office?”

“This may sound ridiculous, but… I feel like we were happiest in that office. Despite everything bad that happened there.”

_Before everything changed for the worst. Before you died and left and I gave our son away._

She steps forward and hugs him tightly. “I’m coming home,” she says into his chest. “I promise. Someday.” 

“You are home for me,” he mutters. And it’s true, she’s been the only home he’s had for a long time. Twenty-three years. But he wants their home back, the one they’d built together. He wants to stop staring at the empty rooms and halls and only ever see her in them. 

She pulls away and kisses his mouth. “You should stay here,” she says. “As much as you want, I mean. It’s closer to work. You can sleep in.” 

That should be good enough, but it doesn’t feel like it. He kisses her temple, and heads down the hall to shower. She’s bought his normal brand of shampoo.

He wishes the sight of it doesn’t sting.


End file.
